Johnny gets home yesterday after a long day teaching inner-city schoolchildren, and what does he find in his mailbox? In addition to the latest issue of Chocolate Pussies, Johnny found a goddamn Christmas card. I'm still crapping out last week's turkey, for crissake.
The nerve of some people, trying to spread goodwill and cheer! The card's only redeeming quality was the fact it didn't contain one of those photocopied form letters along with it, updating you on the fabulous events of the past year. You know the ones I’m talking about. And if you don't, allow me to enlighten you with an excerpt from Johnny's previously posted non-erotic fiction opus, Tongue & Tail. Enjoy!
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Greetings! Well, this past year has been quite a whirlwind for us. John was recently promoted to Vice President of Midwest Regional Sales—he’s busy but he loves it. I’ve got my hands full with the kids, but I’ve still got time for my projects (Did someone say embroidery!?!). John Jr. scored his first basket last week (like father, like son!) and Lori is excelling in ballet (she looks like a little princess in her outfit!). Somehow, we fit in a trip for the whole family to Florida (Mickey & Minnie for the kids and some much needed R&R for mom and dad!). Life couldn’t be better for us! Merry Christmas!
Just once, I wish someone had the balls to send out a letter detailing how the year really went.
Well, John got fatter. What’d you expect from someone who sits on the couch every night and drinks a sixer of Bud? And, let’s face it, I’m no prom queen either. I spend most of my days ironing and watching Oprah (I couldn’t believe it when she gave every audience member a brand-new Pontiac!). No wonder we haven’t had sex in nearly two years. Not that John can get it up anymore, anyway. (Thanks, Rogaine!) As for the kids, well, to be honest, they’re a real pain-in-the-you-know-what. John Jr.’s one of the slower (“special”) kids in his class and is, hands down, the least popular. He’s always picked last for sports, though he is excelling in ballet. He’s—how shall we say it?—a bit soft. Okay, he’s gay. We all know it. It’s just a matter of time. John Sr. barely says two words to him. As for Lori, well, she’s, hands down, the most popular—with the boys. Okay, she’s a slut. All mid-riff, thong and ass-crack. We’d send her off to private school if John’s drinking habit hadn’t prevented him from getting that promotion. Still, we feel blessed! Merry Christmas!
A question for the ages. Difficult to answer, if not impossible. Though, I gave it a shot last August. I explained the name was based on the lead character in Bruce Springsteen's "Incident On 57th Street," perhaps my favorite song of all time. I also went on to confess that I've spent the past quarter century chasing Bruce all over the goddamn world in a vain attempt to see it performed live. I had accepted the fact that it was not meant to be, that the window to see "Incident" was closed.
Johnny was wrong.
Two weeks ago, at New York's Madison Square Garden, I not only saw Bruce play "Incident On 57th Street," I saw him blow the fucking doors off the building—and blow out that closed window, too.
In your face, God!
And by God, I don't mean Bruce—though he is and always will be my one and only God.
(Note to my three loyal readers: I know you come to Johnny expecting—nay, demanding—filth and fury. Please indulge me this one time. And guess what? Odds are, this post will still end up with its share of offensive and disgusting prose. It's all Johnny knows.)
Since my post last August, I'd seen Bruce live three more times and had given up on seeing "Incident." (This included a show this past May where Bruce was given a handwritten sign from an audience member reading, "INCIDENT," only to decide not to play it, after all. Devastating. It was like having Megan Fox coyly lift up her skirt, spread her long legs wide open, and seeing a miniature Bruce Springsteen inside her beautiful vagina, holding a tiny handwritten sign reading, "INCIDENT," but deciding to play "My Hometown" instead.) Then, this summer, Bruce announced that he'd playing specific albums in their entirety during the remainder of his 2009 Working On A Dream Tour. Unsurprisingly, the albums he'd chosen were Born To Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town and Born In The U.S.A. Not "Incident's" album, 1973's The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle.
No way would he ever play that.
Johnny was wrong. Again.
(Though, chronologically speaking, this 'wrong' took place months before the earlier-mentioned 'wrong,' so the 'again' should really be retroactively applied to that one, right? Fuck, I'm confused. If only Megan Fox's beautiful vagina was here to clear up this mess.)
On November 3, Bruce announced he'd be playing The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle in its entirety on Saturday, November 7 at Madison Square Garden.
Holy fucking shit.
That gave me four days to get tickets. To a sold-out show. One that was easily the toughest Springsteen ticket of the past decade.
Holy fucking shit.
Johnny was getting into that show. How Johnny was getting into that show was another story. A minor detail. "Incident," for the first time ever, was guaranteed to be played on November 7 and Johnny would absolutely be there, even if Al Qaeda released a tape to Al Jazeera promising to detonate the Garden smack in the middle of Bruce's guitar solo.
If only Megan Fox's beautiful vagina was here to help me procure tickets.
Voila!
Not now, sweetie. I've got more important things to worry about. Okay, maybe one quick bang. Let me just get my coc--oops. Jeez. What a mess. Does that count? That counts, right?
Shit. (Thanks for nothing, Little Spanish Johnny.)
Beautiful as it may be, Megan Fox's vagina was no help in getting tickets. So I turned to the next best thing: My former arch-enemy, Mega Superior Gold, aka MSG (how aptly named), aka the villain longtime readers know as Nobes. Johnny and Nobes searched high and low for seats, wheeling and dealing with a rogue's gallery of vermin, aka the lowliest lifeforms on the planet, aka Springsteen ticket scalpers. Picture the creatures from the cantina in Star Wars (NERRRRRRRRRRD!!!), but driving Camaros and wearing Drakkar. These motherfuckers were trying to gouge us left and right. So we turned to a much more reputable source, Craigslist—a great site to find tickets and/or Boston-area women you may be interested in slaying.
We quickly found a great pair for a fair price. But, there was one catch: They were eTickets.
You know, the kind that allow you to print out 50 copies on your printer and sell to as many wide-eyed dumbasses as you like?
Still, they seemed our best—if not, only—option. I insisted on meeting the seller in person. The fact the seller was a Jewish woman made me feel better. (The name was a dead giveaway.) Does that make me anti-Semitic, sexist or just plain naive?
I was incredibly nervous heading over to meet her. And, yes, I honestly believed the homeless man in front of our meeting spot was going to walk up to me and say she couldn't make it so she sent him instead. Then demand that I give him my hard-earned money. Thank God, I was wrong. Again. (Ahem. Oh, for crissake. Who gives a fuck where the 'wrong' or the 'again' should chronologically be? Enough already! It wasn't funny the first time!) Fortunately, she arrived at the same time and seemed perfectly normal and, more importantly, trustworthy. After consummating the deal—to answer your question, Yes, we fucked—I walked away feeling 99% confident the tickets were legit. But, fuck, I could not shake that last 1% of doubt. For all I knew, she was just the pretty face of some sleazy Israeli or Eastern European crime syndicate taking advantage of desperate Bruce fans up and down the East Coast.
The only way I was going to find out the truth about the tickets was by handing them to the ticket taker on November 7.
How I got through the remainder of the week, I'll never know. Let's just say, no one should ever drink that much Orange Julius. When the night of the show finally arrived, I had butterflies the size of pigeons in my stomach. Nobes and I approached Madison Square Garden, tickets in our hands, hearts in our throats.
Nervous as schoolgirls, we headed for the entrance gate. Were we holding hands? Hard to remember. And impossible to prove. After waiting in an impossibly long line, the moment of truth arrived. I avoided the usher's eyes and handed over my sweat-drenched ticket, which may have looked like a plain 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, but was the golden ticket to me. Provided it worked. The usher held his scanning gun over the ticket's bar code for what seemed an interminable amount of time.
Fucking Eastern Europeans. They fucked us, I thought.
I will find them and cut out their spleens. No, better yet, I will discover what artist they long to see—Yanni? The Jonas Brothers? The Yanni Brothers?—then create counterfeit tickets to sell to them at a ridiculously high premium. Then I will cut out their spleens.
Beeeeep.
No red flags, no nothing. Just one short, beautiful beep. I walked through the gate and was inside Madison Square Garden.
Success.
I felt as happy as if I'd just double-teamed the Doublemint twins while eating a bowl of chocolate peanut butter Haagen Dazs—not even caring that the Doublemint twins were now 73-years old.
The Garden didn't carry chocolate peanut butter Haagen Dazs, so I settled for a hot dog, pretzel and, oh, about half-a-dozen beers. Before I knew it, the lights went down. "Good evening, New York City!"
Whoever told you Nobes and I were still holding hands was lying.
As Bruce—holding his trusty Fender and looking cool as all fuck—opens with the rarest of rarities, "Thundercrack," I know this will be a night for the ages.
The first hour of the show goes by in a blur. Then I hear the opening piano notes of "Incident," ten songs in, and I feel like my heart is going to burst. Were their tears flowing down my face? Please. I'm not some sort of pussy. Okay, maybe I am, because fuck if I wasn't overcome with emotion. And to those who think that sounds a little ridiculous, I say this: You should be so lucky. Seriously. To have something that meaningful in your life is a blessing. (Granted, for the prior 25 dry years, I felt it was a curse.)
Ten minutes and thirty-one seconds later, culminating in a truly stunning guitar solo, it's over. As the band segues seamlessly into "Rosalita" (just like on the original album), I find myself jumping up and down, screaming—as much to Rosy's opening riff as to the fact that this self-imposed anchor has been lifted off my shoulders. To this day, the moment still feels surreal, like I watched myself watching it. After waiting so long for something you want so badly, odds are, it won't live up to the hype. This did, and then some. Johnny's white whale had been slain on a night that would never be topped.
That is, until the next night.
When I returned to the Garden and saw Bruce perform "The River" in its entirety, blowing the fucking roof sky high and my mind right along with it.
This was a true story. And it will haunt you till the day you die, Johnnyheads—even more so than last year’s yarn.
The tale begins with something that inspires terror in even the toughest of souls: Doggy diarrhea. More specifically, Chocolate Labrador diarrhea.
A brief history of Labradorrhea. Labs—particularly Spanish Doggy—love to eat shit they shouldn’t eat. And I mean that quite literally: Their own shit, other dogs’ shit, deer shit, bird shit. Any and every type of shit out there. Basically, you shit it out, Spanish Doggy will eat it. As if that's not charming enough, he also loves to eat the dead carcasses of the animals that provide said shit. Over the years, he’s eaten everything fromdead birds and rotting rabbits to flattened squirrels and—I swear to God—a decomposing manta ray.
Spanish Doggy ain’t the brightest dog on the block.
Needless to say, these things wreak havoc on his digestive system—and consequently, our rugs. (Surprisingly, when canines consume festering flesh and organs, they have trouble controlling their bowels.) Though our apartment consists mostly of hardwood floors, Spanish Doggy—God bless him—will only expel his leavings on the Oriental rug in the living room. Same spot, every goddamn time. Like anyone who’s ever banged an Olsen twin, the rug—no matter how much scrubbing—will never be clean again.
So there’s the back story. Time for the scary story…
A couple weeks ago, I’m sound asleep in my bed, dreaming of flying above the Colorado sky in a shiny homemade helium balloon craft made by my wacky scientist father, when I’m awakened by heavy panting and reeking hot breath on my face. No, my arch nemesis, Nobes, wasn’t lying beside me. Not this night, anyway. It was Spanish Doggy, standing by the side of the bed, tongue out, panting heavily in my face. It was 3:44am. He was clearly trying to tell me something.
“What is it, boy? Is there a fire at the old Miller place?”
No reaction.
“Is someone trapped in a mineshaft, boy?”
Nothing.
“Did you eat something unholy and are on the brink of a diarrhea explosion?”
Bingo.
I jumped out of bed, leashed him up and headed for the elevator.
He tried to squat in the downstairs lobby, but I held him off. We headed outside and ran across the street to Riverside Park, Spanish Doggy sprinting like a greyhound at the dog track.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Spanish Doggy’s relief was splattering all over the sidewalk.
Once fully expunged, I was immediately struck by how quiet it was. Eerily so. I looked around: Not another human being in sight. Sure, it was the middle of the night, but it was still the middle of New York City. It was unsettling to hear no noises whatsoever.
Still, we decided to walk a bit. Air out Spanish Doggy’s ass before heading back inside. And then we saw it. A sight that still gives me chills.
Sitting on the stone fence overlooking the park were seven cats—six black ones and a white one smack in the middle of them.
They were each sitting like hens on an egg, wide awake, staring at us. The site of a 90-pound chocolate lab did nothing to them. They didn’t flinch. Didn’t react one bit. It was as if they were saying, “You pussies don’t frighten us.” Pretty insulting coming from, well, pussies.
Even Spanish Doggy was taken aback by the scenario, initially cocking his head to the side in classic doggy fashion: “WTF?” Followed quickly by forceful pulling in the opposite direction, as if to say, Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here. The cats, unmoved, continued to stare. Were they communicating with Spanish Doggy? Threatening him telepathically? God, cats are such assholes.
Part of the reason we became so unhinged is that while we were well aware of a solitary black cat living in the park, we’d never seen more than one, so we just assumed he or she lived alone. (What does a lonely, single cat in the city live with for companionship? A smaller pet cat? A rat?) Little did I know there were six of them, plus the even more mysterious white one—each probably showing up at a designated time to take over the prior one’s shift. Surreptitiously replacing one another, like the Olsen twins on Full House. (Another Olsen twin reference? Really? After having a total of zero in the previous 161 posts? What’s that all about?)
Anyway, we’ve reached the point in the story where one of the leading characters loses it; in this case, it was Spanish Doggy. If this was a horror film, here’s where he would’ve inexplicably lit himself on fire and leapt out a window. Being a dog, he instead began barking and lunging ferociously, like the three-headed hound from Hades, Cerberus (NERRRRRRRRRD!!!), followed by what could only be described as a dying wolf's howl. Some of spookiest sounds you’ll ever fucking hear. Especially considering this is not a dog who howls.
All the while, the cats—the stupid fucking cats—sat there, frozen, staring at us. Except for the white cat, clearly their leader. She—so obviously a chick—began unassumingly licking her paws. The ultimate fuck you to us.
It was time to go.
Spanish Doggy and I did a quick 180 and headed home, each more grateful than the other. We rushed into our apartment, locking and bolting the door behind us. Did I invite Spanish Doggy into the bed with me because I was a little scared? Maybe. Did I kick him out due to unspeakable doggy gas? Absolutely.
A few days later, the two of us were walking through the park, trying to mind our own business. Sitting atop the fence, by his lonesome, was a single black cat. I stared at him, thinking, “I know your secret, cat.”
He hissed at us.
The nastiest fucking hiss you will ever hear.
“I swear I won’t tell anyone!” I blurted out, once again terrified.
